Im part of a subreddit right now that seems to be under siege by a heavy number of bots or human-bots. All I can tell is they post everyday on the same topic (politics) then they themselves cross post and post under their own thread with constant incendiary commentary. The big tell seems to be they post at least 75 comments a day and never appear to sleep. They only post about politics and only in this subreddit and always with the same bent.
How can I tell if these people are even real?
It also seems some are using these bots to change course of a subreddit [2], where they are upvoting/downvoting on mass (evading Reddit's usual bot trappings, which IIRC mostly stem from IP?). It's going to be very very interesting to see how easier access to bots is going to affect a lot of social sites.
There are two funny things about this entire situation: A) by attempting to call out these bots in some subs, you'll be warned/banned for brigading or being uncivil, and B) some subs have tried to be proactive about the situation but wound up being chastised[3] for various reasons like relying on AI detection tooling which produces a lot of false positives, and a general nonchalance as long as bots "post quality".
So basically, outside of external verification and pattern matching, you can't.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/comments/12ssf...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/botwatch/comments/125iurb/me_and_ot...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/11vw6qp/post...
But yeah generally I agree about the tooling, they're relying on methods that seem to be even more superficial and random than username pattern matching, and we really should be turning to the likes of Bard and OpenAI to instead implement solutions to make that easier.
And then also color these by the average response time, etc. But don't rely on these types metrics because they're the easiest to avoid by simply delaying responses based on their length and complexity, plus a random discovery time, plus a time-of-day dependent offset.
And then, potentially just issue warnings. "You've been detected participating in a brigading fashion, and bot or not, may be banned if this continues" and see what changes.
Looks like it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/11vw6qp/post...
The problem isn't using these systems, the problem is that there is no nuance. No way to reach a human who can see the absurdity. But this has been a progression and even bureaucratic institutions do this with real humans. This is a frustration we all experience and we shouldn't make this worse. Use the tools, but always maintain a way to reach a human who can account for system failures.
An important issue with ML system failures is that when they fail, they fail bad. Anyone who has used GPT should be well aware of this and have experienced it (if you haven't, you haven't used it much, are incredibly lucky, or have been duped). It is also the reason AlphaGo lost that one game, and it played REALLY poorly. These higher dimensional spaces are rather complex and don't fit your intuitions. You'll have a better idea of how to stroll through flat land than you will through 10D land, let alone 2562563 (an image) land. The curse of dimensionality is that any intuition you have of geometrical meaning goes out the window.
Regarding this, I also noticed a pattern in usernames once, but realized that Reddit itself generates these usernames for new users, who often just accept it because they don’t care about their nicks. So usernames like Green-Biscuit398 are often real users!
I don’t know if that’s the pattern you’re referring to. But for me it makes it even harder to make any claims about the user from the obvious artificial name.
That policy is why a lot of posts on the linked subs try to avoid purely going off username unless there's another larger pattern linking them such as all of them repeating the same comment, or sharing the same link across subs in short time. Ignoring the scripts that generate names like elizabeth99057524 that exceed Reddit's username pattern (which seems to limit itself to two words, optional symbol dividers, 2-4 digits, and properly capitalized).
One of the more odd patterns, is dormant/hacked/purchased accounts. Reddit has a somewhat aggressive commenting policy for new accounts and the community at large seems to treat them differently - so you'll see in those bot tracking subs that a lot of accounts highlighted aren't new but quite old and were likely purchased or hacked. I suppose someone sees value in doing so, and I guess with enough of them purchased you can plant enough votes to encourage Reddit to do the rest (ie upvote a thread enough to get it to the front page of the sub, but not enough to alert people, letting actual users mindlessly upvote it as well).
I wouldn't be surprised if the HN team is already doing a lot of work already. Another factor that may have spared the HN community is that there are lower hanging fruit to pick first, reddit being the prime example.
I have no idea what ATPO is supposed to be, but IMEI/IMSI[1] is definitely not an government issued ID.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Equipment...
do you want them storing and transferring your identification papers?
Youtube is already collecting IDs in the EU if you want to view age-restricted content.
Some countries also have ID cards that allow you to digitally prove you are 18 without revealing your ID, maybe that could be used for proving you're human as well (don't know if there is a way to prevent farming here).
and existing identification requirements don’t lessen the ask. lest wearing identification visibly at all times become the norm. at that point there isn’t an ask.
and it shouldn’t matter as much if it’s an extra participant in the conversation?
Who actually wants to talk to an unidentified AI?
Humans can post annoying spam too. Look at any social group that attracts pyramid schemers or get rich quick cryptocurrency schemes. Those aren't bots, they're just annoying.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding OP. IT sounds like there are people on a subreddit talking about politics all the time. That's annoying, but that's also basically the behavior of most people on reddit, bot or not.
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